Online Communities

The Rebus Community

The Rebus Community is an online forum that facilitates collaboration on open education projects. It’s a great place to go to invite collaborators for a project you’re working on or to become a collaborator on an effort you find meaningful. Teams working on open educational resources will often use Rebus forums to post calls for participation from subject matter experts, editors, illustrators, translators, reviewers, and more.

The Rebus Community also hosts the Textbook Success Program, a cohort-based community for those creating open educational resources. Participants apply to join a cohort of faculty members, program leads, and other open textbook creators for a twelve-session course and regular support calls with OER professionals.

The Open Education Network

The Open Education Network is an initiative based in the University of Minnesota. UW-Madison is an active member of the Open Education Network, and our OER Working Group liasions are happy to pass along questions and celebrate resources you create via the Open Education Network listserv!

The OEN also hosts the Open Textbook Library, a comprehensive resource for openly-licensed academic textbooks.

The Open Pedagogy Notebook

Part blog and part community space, the Open Pedagogy Notebook hosts a number of posts and sample assignments by educators involved in open pedagogy approaches.

Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN)

The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) is a network of PhD candidates around the world whose research projects include a focus on open education (i.e. OER, OEP, MOOC). These doctoral researchers are at the core of the network. Around them, over two hundred experts, supervisors, mentors and interested parties connect to form a community of practice.

Twitter

Lots of open ed folks connect with one another and seek information via Twitter. We recommend searching the #oer hashtag and exploring colleagues followed by the UW-Madison OER Librarian Twitter account as one starting point for finding likeminded colleagues.

Conferences

The Open Education Conference

The Open Education Conference meets yearly, traditionally in October. This is one of the main open-ed-focused conferences in the US and attracts a number of international colleagues as well.

The “E”ffordability Summit (UW-Stout)

The “E”ffordability Summit is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Stout. The conference has been growing substantially each year and now attracts a range of participants from across Wisconsin and neighboring states. The summit’s organizers describe it as “an opportunity for anyone concerned with the cost of educational materials to come together and discuss topics centered around providing quality and affordable curricular content.” As this description suggests, the conference explores topics beyond open education, but the conference itself has a number of OER-focused panels and is a great opportunity to learn about OER from practitioners and students.

To learn more about the summit, see this 2018 spotlight article.